Window on Eurasia -- New Series

Monday, March 19, 2018

Staunton, March 17 – Tomorrow,
Russians will go to vote after what Yekaterinburg commentator Aleksey Shaburov
says has been “one of the strangest Russian presidential campaigns” ever, a
campaign that was about mobilization rather than choice, suppression of
differences of opinion rather than their clarification, and a failure to talk
about the future.

The Yekaterinburg commentator says
that even before the results are tabulated, there were three features of these
elections that defined them and their likely impact on Russia’s future,
features perhaps never entirely absent in earlier campaigns but that have
defined the one just concluded (politsovet.ru/58332-vybory-2018-chto-eto-bylo.html).

First, from day one it was clear to
everyone that Vladimir Putin would win if he wanted to. What mattered was not
that outcome but rather the level of participation because this election was
all about the ability of the regime to mobilize the population, something
measured by participation rather than by the share of votes cast for this or
that candidate.

That was shown by the enormous and
striking difference between the amount of money and effort the authorities
devoted to getting people to turn out to vote as compared to that devoted to
getting them to vote for Putin. “Was participation really more important for
the authorities than the results? Of course not.”

But the goal of the campaign was
mobilization because that provides a measure of the capacity of the Putin
regime not just to get people to come to the polls but its ability to get them
to act.This “transformation of the elections
into a mobilization campaign is not a good signal because it deprives elections
of their proper function and makes other things possible.

Second, elections are supposed to be
the occasion for contesting points of view, for challenging the positions of
those in power by those outside. But the campaign just concluded almost
completely eliminated that possibility for within system protests that could
help both the incumbents and the opposition know better where the population is
and how to proceed.

“All the concerns that the elections
would lead to a growth in protest attitudes and to the exacerbation of
contradictions in society turned out to be for naught,” Shaburov says. One need
not restrict this to political protests but rather to enlarge it social ones
because there are many social problems in Russia that should have given rise to
protest. That didn’t happen.

“The only significant protests during
this time were connected with ecology,” with concerns about trash disposal. “But
ecological protest by definition is local and therefore it is not appropriate
to talk about its national dimensions.”A
major reason for the absence of protests is the opposition candidates did not
encourage them lest they be accused of “’rocking the boat.’”

Even Aleksey Navalny, who wasn’t
allowed to be a candidate, did not make use of his efforts to stimulate protest
attitudes.He focused instead on
promoting a boycott, that is, on demobilizing the population rather than
mobilizing it against the authorities, according to Shaburov.

If this absence of protests was very useful
for the authorities, the commentator says, “it was not for society. Elections
are the best means of talking about all-national problems, finding ways for
their resolution or at least raising them at the level of the entire country.
But nothing like that happened;” and it is difficult to foresee when it will.

And third, this election produced no
model for the future even though many had expected Putin to declare his
intentions.But he did not. “Moreoveer,
Putin didn’t even present his own pre-election program.”Putin himself became the image of the future,
not any specific policies. In that sense, the campaign reinforced the notion
that “if there is Putin, there is Russia.”

What these three
things mean, Shaburov argues, is that this non-campaign campaign isn’t going to
be remembered for very long.Instead,
Russians will immediately start thinking about the 2024 elections “if of course
they in fact will take place.”

Staunton, March 17 – Among the major
changes that have occurred in Russia since Soviet times, Aleksey Makarkin says,
is a diversification in the reasons Russians hate the West.In the USSR, there was a single ideological message
that the population was expected to accept as to why the West was to be hated.
Now, there are many such messages.

“In Soviet times,” the Moscow
political analyst says, “hatred was based on official propaganda,” a source
which was increasingly distrusted.Now, however,
it is based on a far more varied set of sources of information, with Russians
now having access to more reasons for hating the West (rosbalt.ru/posts/2018/03/15/1689028.html).

That means that
not all Russians hate the West for the same reasons: some hate the outside
world for one reason and others for a different one, Makarkin argues; and that
in turn means that the ability of the Kremlin to change directions on this
point may be far less than either it or many in the West think.

A Russian today can “hate the West
because 14 powers launched a campaign against the young Soviet republic” or
because it “did not save the sainted emperor and his family from the hands of
the bloody Bolsheviks,” he points out.

Alternatively, a Russian can hate
the West for launching the Normandy invasion only in 1944 and not two years
earlier as Moscow wanted, and at the same time, other Russians can hate the
West for the firebombing of Dresden.They can hate the West for not returning Russians to the USSR after 1945
and for forcibly deporting Russians to the Soviet Union.

And a Russian is offered the chance to hate
the West for destroying the Soviet Union or for failing to embrace it more
fully once that happened, Makarkin writes. “People on the left are angry at
colonial expansion; those on the right are upset by single-sex marriages;” and
so on and so forth, a diversity never seen in Soviet times.

“Such [diverse] hatred has a more
constant character, even more so because various arguments in a post-modernist
and pluralist society can be combined depending on individual choice without
having to consider the position of the party committee.” Thus, one can hate the
West whether one is “an Orthodox Stalinist or an anti-fascist xenophobe.”

Staunton, March 17 – Most countries around
the world are or aspire to be nation states in which all the members of their societies
share a common identity and have common rights and responsibilities, Mikhail
Pozharsky says; but Russia in contrast, however much its leaders talk about the
nation, is in fact divided up into social strata with different identities,
rights and duties.

In today’s world, the Moscow
commentator says, “the only alternative to a nation state is a strata society,”
and Russia under Vladimir Putin has again become one, thus rejecting or being
deprived of the rights and freedoms which only a nation state can provide its
people (mbk.media/sences/mixail-pozharskij-edinstvennoj/).

Present-day Russia, Pozharsky says, “suspiciously
recalls a strata-based society. It is obviously divided into groups which have
different rights and different responsibilities.For example, the average ‘Chechen’ has
somewhat different rights than the average ‘Russian.’’ He can be almost openly
a racketeer, but he also has certain limits: he cannot be gay.

Similarly, “the average resident of
Russia and the officer of the FSB have completely different rights” and this
will lead them to behave in completely different ways. If an FSB officer runs
over a pedestrian, he will simply record the license plate number and go on,
confident that “nothing will happen to him,” something very different from the
situation of other Russians.

Thus, Pozharsky says, “we live in an
obviously strata-based society and at that in one of its worst variants. All
these different rights, privileges and responsibilities are nowhere written
done or set in stone. They exist in an unwritten form because ‘everyone
understands.’” But that also means no one can count on them either.

Russia’s failure to move toward a
nation state as Ukraine and other countries has, the commentator continues, “is
entirely connected with the historical fate of Russian nationalism.” The Uvarov
trinity of the 19th century – Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality –
provides a clue to understanding why Russia is what it is.

The nation is put in third place,
after Orthodoxy and Autocracy, an indication, Pozharsky says, that the nation
exists not in its own right but to support the other two, that is, “to feed the
tsar, the priests and the nobility.”

That pattern, of course, “was not a
purely Russian phenomenon.” Crudely speaking, there is the nationalism of a
social contract like that in England or the nationalism of the realization of
the state as the highest form of existence as Fichte and Hegel postulated for
Germany two centuries ago. Russia is part of the latter world, not the former.

Thus in this sphere as in so many others, “Russia
did not think up something new in principle but simply borrowed this idea” and
imposed it with such force and enthusiasm that many Russians imagine it to be
uniquely theirs.But they understand
very well that spontaneous, contractual nationalism is something quite alien to
theirs

That keeps nationalism and
liberalism apart in Russia, something that was not the case in Britain, and
makes it very difficult to explain to Russian liberals that “nationalism is not
xenophobia” and to Russian nationalists that liberalism, which releases the
power of the nation, is not their enemy.

Both the protests of 2011-2012 and
even more the responses of Russians to the events in Ukraine in 2014 confirm
that, Pozharsky continues.According to
him, “Crimea and ‘the Russian spring’ were [not] the result of some long-term
geopolitical plan. The Kremlin reacted to the situation but things turned out
very conveniently for it.”

As so often in the past, Russian nationalists
and Russian liberals both found themselves deceived by the Russian state for
the usual Uvarov rules: the nationalists soon discovered that the Russian state
wasn’t interested in national rebirth in their understanding; and the liberals
found themselves at odds with the imperial nature of the state. Those
differences kept them apart.

Of course, Pozharsky says, there are
also “objective preconditions for the formation of a nation state. These
include a diversified economy, the existence of a bourgeoisie and middle class
with its own interests which can unify others around these interests.” And
Russia lacks all of these as well.

Russia today is “a state in which
two-thirds of the budget comes from oil and gas sales and most of the middle
class consists of state employees or those whose livelihood is based on state contracts.
It is understandable that to mobilize them for a national project is much more difficult
than in countries where these nation states were formed historically.”

That is in countries like the US, “a
country of a bourgeoisie and farms,” Pozharsky explains. “But we have a country
of state employees, policemen, and those who depend on them.” For such a
country, a social strata state is easier to organize and likely to keep a
nation state from appearing.